As illustrated in FIG. 1, wafers 102 (mounted on wafer frames 104, for example) are usually packed in wafer boxes 106 for delivery to customers. In the case of manual loading and removal of the wafers, there can be damage to the wafers, e.g. scratches, if one of the wafers slides with its edge against a surface of the wafer underneath as it is inserted into the wafer box or removed from the wafer box, e.g. because the wafer inserted or removed is tilted during this process.
During downstream processing of the chips in a semiconductor housing, one difficulty can be that of tracing defects in a chip surface to scratches during removal (that is to say being able to exclude the possibility of scratches already being present in the state as delivered). Moreover, there is the possibility that scratches on the chip surface may not necessarily lead immediately to failure but only after stress during application or in reliability tests, making it difficult to detect the cause of the defect.
In order to limit the risk of chip damage during loading and removal of the wafer, the only possibility hitherto has been to use overdimensioned wafer boxes with increased insertion lengths (“pitches”). One effect here is that standard packaging machines cannot load these boxes in an automated way. Moreover, these larger boxes can cost approximately 2.5 times as much as a conventional “horizontal wafer box” (also referred to as a frame shipper). Furthermore, transport costs can be increased in using these larger wafer boxes since, with these boxes, the volumetric weight is approximately three times that of the horizontal wafer box. Moreover, there are as yet no larger wafer boxes for transporting entire lots, that is to say usually 25, of 300 mm wafers on sawing frames, which would in any case no longer be movable by hand owing to the heavy weight thereof.